PMSCs — private military and security companies.
It wasn’t as though Shinonome knew nothing about them.
Back before he’d been whisked away to another world, the Iraq War had been in the news, and there’d been stories about PMSCs causing trouble and stirring up controversy. He seemed to remember that a PMSC had been involved in what sparked the Battle of Fallujah too.
But Japan and private military companies had always seemed like separate worlds.
Or maybe he’d just never known — maybe overseas, there had been contracts between PMSCs and the Japanese government or corporations all along.
Still, the fact that law enforcement across the entire greater metro area — the TMC — had shifted from beat cops to a private military company was wrong no matter how you looked at it.
Right. Oi Integrated Security was a PMSC.
More precisely — the Oi Praetorian Guard, a spinoff from a Taiwanese firm called Pacific Security Corporation.
In one sense, TMC was completely Oi’s territory. Anything happens, it’s not the police that show up — it’s Oi Integrated Security.
And they came loaded: assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns as a matter of course, attack helicopters, something called armored suits. Getting Swiss-cheesed would be getting off easy.
All of this had been explained by their ride for this job, a man named Hirota H. Suzu.
A man somewhere around thirty who said he couldn’t drive without being on e-drugs while working, so they let him use e-drugs.
Of all people to make their getaway driver, a junkie — Shinonome cursed Jane Doe under his breath a little.
“Hey, what does e-drugs actually feel like…”
“Well. It stimulates the brain directly. You know the BCI demo experience? Something like that. Someone else’s experience comes flooding into your brain. Like, the last moments of some guy who OD’d on uppers. Blows your mind, right?”
“Ugh……”
Getting high by experiencing a dead man’s last moments vicariously. That was sick. Deeply, thoroughly sick.
“Anyway, though. What are we hauling? Come on, tell me.”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Is it bad stuff?”
“You don’t need to know.”
Come on, aren’t we a team? Hirota grumbled.
Shinonome wondered if this man knew he was a disposable piece. But he felt no obligation to tell him, so he let it go.
Getting involved and letting yourself feel something for people never led anywhere good.
Strictly a work relationship. Nothing more, nothing other.
“When do we move, bro?”
“Soon.”
They also had a profile on the commander heading up the enemy’s security detail — apparently the type who played it tight and by the book.
There was intel on the Atlantis Land Systems delivery site too, but they weren’t hitting it there. Going in guns blazing at the enemy’s base of operations was reckless by any measure.
Atlantis, as a Big Six AAA+ multinational, had been granted extraterritoriality — effectively the infamous CPA Order 17 situation all over again.
If illegal mercenaries like Shinonome and the others attacked an Atlantis convoy, they could be shot dead on the spot with no charges, no trial, nothing.
Not that a company that cared about its brand image would go quite that far. But hit their convoy and they’d definitely shoot to kill. No complaints accepted.
Same went for Oi Integrated Security — they shoot first and ask questions later, Hirota had said.
He’d thought he’d adjusted to this half-dark world, but it was still so different from the Japan he’d known that it threw him off more often than he’d like.
Well. Whatever else, right now it was work.
If hitting the storage site was reckless, hit the convoy instead.
The enemy was tight, sure — a full company assigned to security — but only a company.
One company — around three hundred men. Even assuming full firearms — if the ambush landed, he could handle it. Shinonome hadn’t survived this long for nothing.
In the other world he’d been up against arrows and attack spells fired at bullet speed. In engagements of three thousand, six thousand. A single company was nothing, at this point.
Though that didn’t mean he was without concerns.
The technology of the other world had been clearly inferior. There was no comparison to this one.
And yet even in that other world, Shinonome — now a low-tech nobody — had done what he’d done. He was thinking through what his ceiling was in this one.
This job would be the test to find out.
“Beria. The vehicles?”
“On schedule. Heading our way now.”
Shinonome and the others had chosen a bridge as their ambush point.
An artificial irrigation canal. Shinonome stood on the bridge spanning it; Beria and Hirota waited below in a car — EVs were apparently standard now — parked under the bridge.
Hirota’s car was simple and compact. But fast, he’d boasted.
“Vehicles approaching. Almost here.”
“Let’s make a scene.”
Shinonome drew Moonlight.
Moonlight glowed blue-green in the darkness of the night.
“Here they come——”
“Move.”
Shinonome deployed Moonlight all at once.
New Moon, Crescent, First Quarter, Thirteenth Night, Full Moon, Sixteenth Night, Last Quarter, Moonlight — all eight blades gleamed dimly in the chemical vapors drifting from the canal and swept down on the Atlantis Land Systems convoy.
The blades of Moonlight punched through the windshields of the vehicles, and the Hunter International contractors in the front seats were run through.
Before the frantically dismounting contractors could get into fighting formation, the blades of Moonlight were already dancing through them.
When roughly fifty soldiers had been put down, Shinonome called the blades back and sheathed them — all but one. Holding the single magic sword Moonlight, he charged through.
From the rear, technicals — four-wheel drives with heavy machine guns mounted on them — and vehicles packed with soldiers came flooding in.
Shinonome gripped Moonlight and drove straight at them.
“Damn it! The enemy’s a cyber-samurai!”
“Kill him!”
The heavy machine gunner’s head left his shoulders. The man in the driver’s seat reached for his weapon, but before he got there, Shinonome split his skull in two.
“────!”
A foreign contractor screamed something in English. The F-word. Shinonome tuned it out and cut him down.
Bullets scattered everywhere — Shinonome spun and let them pass.
He deployed all seven blades again, spinning them at high speed to deflect the fire, and under that cover closed the distance. Two of the seven blades broke into a whirling dance and tore through the contractors. Chests pierced, abdomens hit dead-center — contractors went down.
Shinonome pressed in, deflecting and dodging fire, closing the gap again and again — severing heads, scattering blood, not stopping. Blood ran down his water-repellent jacket.
Another round of technicals.
He ran through the spread of gunfire, took the gunner’s head, took the driver’s head. Against Shinonome accelerating at bullet speed, landing a hit was nearly impossible.
By the time a contractor’s barrel found the angle, Shinonome was already gone, and Moonlight was already swinging right in front of their face.
“One hundred.”
One hundred contractors dead. The remaining contractors swung their weapons toward Shinonome to protect the cargo.
“Two hundred left.”
Shinonome accelerated and took down nearly ten contractors in an instant.
This is Cobra Team! Cobra Team! Convoy under attack! Enemy is a cyber-samurai! We are being annihilated! Requesting backup——
The transmission from a dead contractor’s radio cut out.
The man who’d been speaking was already a corpse.
Blood dripping steadily from Moonlight and from his jacket, Shinonome advanced on the contractors as they slowly backed away.
“Two hundred.”
Shinonome counted.
“One hundred left.”
Shinonome raised his blade without ceremony.
“Fire!”
The surviving contractors opened up all at once.
They understood what it meant to fail on a job like this. Big Six multinational work. Screw up and there were consequences.
Shinonome ran through them at a speed the eye couldn’t follow, cutting through necks, driving through hearts, through livers, through kidneys — hitting every vital point in the human body with precision.
The contractors couldn’t find their aim. Before long they were hitting each other.
“Two hundred eighty.”
Shinonome counted.
“Twenty left, give or take.”
……………………